Avignon - a bridge, a palace, and an english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man

View back towards Avignon from the bridge

Avignon is about a hundred km out of Marseille to the north-west, and home to Boris, surprize surprize an AFS Wellington 2009-2010 student. The shortest train trip, but also in some regards the most difficult!

In France, you can buy cheaper tickets online in advance, which I did, but only if you use the French website, the minute I put it into english it took me to another page and things were in pounds and twice the price. Typical French arrogance, lets make anyone dumb enough not to speak French pay more! So I thought I just be clever and buy my tickets from the french site, and proceeded to do so without any problems, so I thought. I get here and France has the weirdest system in place that I've come across. You can't simply print out the ticket that you booked online, like you can in other countries, you need to go to machines in the station and insert the credit card that you used to book it, and it prints out a proper ticket for you.

 Boris and I. Bad photo, I know!

Luckily the first time I tried to do this I wasn't in a hurry, because turns out these machines can't handle foreign credit cards, so everytime I go to take a train in France I first need to line up, carrying my painfully ridiculous amount of luggage and either try to mime what I want to a non-english-speaking-and-unfriendly service person, or in the cases where they actually have a specific english-speaking-but-stillunfriendly service person, wait behind an even longer line of often similarly luggage-laden foreigners in the same position as me. I would prefer the shorter line and take my chances with a non-english speaker, but there is also a mean security man there directing traffic. And these aren't lines like the polite, short lines we have in New Zealand, these are European lines, which always, always, no matter where you are, the supermarket, the post office, the skifield, are at least three times longer and full of people who don't understand the concepts of single-file and waiting-patiently-for-your-turn.

Random small plaza in Avignon

Ok, enough ranting about the lines at the railway station. You get the idea, it adds an unpleasant half hour onto all of my journeys. Normally, I need to give my reference number and then they ask for my credit card to verify my identity about half the time, before printing me out my ticket, which you then need to take and validify yourself in a different machine before you get on the train. Again, something you don't need to do anywhere else. Apparently its so that the controller who comes around to stamp your ticket knows you didn't already use it. Which makes me wonder why he still stamps the ticket.....Oh France. But three months earlier when I had brought my ticket from Marseille to Avignon, I was waiting for my new credit card to arrive and had used mum's instead. Something I would not have done could I read the fine print in French on the website. Not to worry, I thought, half the time they never ask for the card anyway and if they do I will say I lost it, as must surely happen quite frequently, and offer my passport instead, who can refute a passport as proof of identity? Well, as it turns out, the French can!!!

main plaza in Avignon

Yes, this particular english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man refused to let me use the ticket I had brought online three months earlier because I had "lost" my credit card and couldn't use it to prove who I was. For security reasons. Why the hell doesn't my passport prove who I am? Isn't that the safest proof of ID around? Isn't that what every other country in Europe uses as proof of ID for train tickets? Grrrr France. So I then had to buy a new ticket, fill in a similar number of forms to what you would need to buy a house in NZ, and wait for them to process the forms, send them to the accounts department, and then refund me...7 euros. Little lesson on efficiency France, wasting the time of the english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man, all the office people out the back, the staff at my bank, and me, all over 7 euros = inefficient. Accepting a passport as proof of ID to get the angry NZer out of your face and on her train = efficient.

OK so it is kinda my fault, I brought a ticket with a credit card I didn't have on my person, but seriously. And I don't appreciate english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man telling me the computor system makes it impossible to print the ticket without the card because I have seen it happen so many other times.

View from the Palais over the old centre of Avignon

So I get to Avignon, knowing that Boris was going to be about 20min late to meet me, and just sit on my bag in front of the train station reading and amusing myself watching the drug peddlers, members of the 'moroccan deaf mute association' (similar to the turkish deaf mute association found further north and in Germany, in that in between waving a plea for money in your face they will have group huddles to verbally plan their tactics) and african black-market vendors do their thing in between disappearing when the police patrol came past every twenty minutes. True to form, Boris showed up an hour later and we caught the bus back to his place, outside of Avignon proper, and the first single-story house I've been in during the last three months! The south of France is quite different to the rest of Europe, its much more mediterranean, the houses are flater and golden, with those cool curved terracotta roof tiles. Roof tiles are actually quite important here, you notice throughout Europe that different countries and regions have different varities (flat, curved, big, small, different colours), and apparently some places, or everywhere I dont know,  have laws about what kinds of tiles you can use to maintain the traditional look of the region.

Boris (right) and two of his friends on St Pats day

My laziness seemed to come with me from Marseille, for some reason I was absolutely shattered and after chatting to Boris for a bit, just went for a wee nap, that turned into a really big nap because he couldn't wake me to go out wth him! Eventually I woke, had dinner with his parents while he came back home, and then went for a walk with him just around the neighbourhood a bit to see the view. Thursday he had school, and I did more of the same lazing around the house, sleeping and catching up on emails and blog etc, and playing with Boris's cat, who is freakishly small and really seems like she's on a permanent acid trip, she is nuts, gets freaked out by everything and runs around the house jumping on stuff escaping invisible monsters. We went out that night as it was St Patrick's day, to a bar called Wall Street where all the students go for cheap drinks. Have to hand it to them, the drinks were cheap and they put a lot of effort into irish decorations, but they had a huge map of the world painted on the wall, minus New Zealand! Travesty! I found it quite funny, this party in the name of St Pats in a French bar, full of french people. At least in NZ we can claim a bit of Irish ancestry to justify the party! Boris's friends really speak no english, so I just amused myself with the cheap drinks until we went home quite late, I have no idea how he managed to get up the next morning for school! I definitely was not up that early in the morning, and again spent the day sleeping, emailing, blogging and swearing I would get out of the house the next day.



Little plaza in Avignon

 The weekend was supposed to be pretty quiet party-wise as everyone had exams the following week, but we went with some of Boris's friends to what he described as a tragic old man pub that they went to for cheap beer when they had nothing better to do. It pretty much lived up to the description, except it was quite packed and full of what seemed like a club of spanish bulfighting supporters, complete with videos projected onto the wall and red bandanas around everyones neck. It was quite strange, none of us really new what was going on, so we just sat outside drinking our cheap beers. The weather had changed dramatically by the time I got down to this part of France, it was warm and sunny during the days, but still quite cold at nights.

Wall around the town centre

The next day Boris went to the library to study (yes, for those of you who know Boris, he surprized me too!) and I went sightseeing! I had never heard anything about Avignon before, I doubt it is very famous outside of Europe, and someone in Marseille said "why the hell are you going to Avignon, there is nothing there except an old bridge, and its not even a whole old bridge, just half an old bridge!" It is actually quite a nice city, the old section is still ringed by the old walls and ramparts, so we parked outside the walls and walked through one of the old arched doors in the wall. In the city, the streets are narrow and windy, and around every couple of corners you find a little plaza filled with tables spilling out from the resturants and bars, and normally a fountain or statue or something. To me, the walls and everything make it seem so medieval, but I love the way to everyone who lives there its just so normal, having to park the car ages away because the walls are in the way.



Pont Saint-Benezet/Pont d'Avignon

 The famous bridge, called Pont Saint-Benezet, or Pont d'Avignon was built in the 1100s, allegedly after a local shepard boy claimed angels commanded him to build it. He got taken seriously after he lifted a massive block of stone and laid it at the riverbank, and then all the wealthy guys in the area stepped in and built the thing, 900m long, across the Rhone river. They built a chapel part way along the bridge, and the shepard became Saint-Benezet and was buried there later. It was put out of use in 1668 after a massive flood and now only four arches remain, so its kind of like a pier you can walk out on. Avignon is really windy, and being out on the bridge was crazy, the wind was so bad it was pulling everything out of my hands.

Palais des Papes

Avignon also has the Palais des Papes, or Palace of the Popes, something I never knew existed! In 1309 Rome was in turmoil so Pope Clement V moved everything to Avignon, and over the next decades the buildings were expanded and remodelled so that now the Palais des Papes is a huge medieval palace complete with all the halls and turrets and ramparts like the castles in computer games when I was a kid. Very cool. The Popes went back in 1377, but then the antipopes took over (something else I didn't know about, see I am learning a lot on this trip!), different guys who opposed the real pope and got enough support for their own claim for being pope, and the real pope only got the Palais back in 1433.

view inside Palais des Papes

In between visiting these I managed to order myself a meal at a chinese resturant, in french, and wander around the shops quite a bit, before I met Boris and we had coffee with a couple of his friends. We went out later that night, just the two of us for a couple of beers in a fancy bar and it was good just to sit around and chat. I really liked Avignon, for all I was really lazy and didn't get out too much. The whole travelling thing really just wore me down though, constantly moving around, packing and unpacking, catching trains, constantly trying new things, looking at museums and old churchs over and over and over. I've found myself longing for simple things, like a bedside table with my own things on it and knowing where in town to get my shoes fixed and just being able to go home when I get tired at a party, not when the friend who I am staying with gets tired. Not that travelling around hasn't been awesome, but I think I'm at the limit of what I can take before I need to settle down for a bit before taking off again. But the other part of me is sad that I have only one more stop to make before I head back to Madrid.

I should mention that when I arrived at Avignon train station to get my train ticket to Toulouse, the non-english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man took my reference number and printed out my ticket without asking for my credit card. Those bastard train service men!

More photos of Avignon are here.